I have done different things in my career, some of which interests me, and some which did not. Doing "something I love" has not really helped me live a pleasant life and sleep well at night. The main drivers for me are more like:

1. Job is important and has an impact on someone or some thing. There is a purpose which makes me feel needed.
2. Job has progress milestones which are achievable with some work. A job with no noticeable progress is miserable monotony. Likewise, a job with unachievable goals is frustrating.
3. Job has the right mix of travel, hands-on work, desk work, etc for ME.
4. Boss who is fair, sets clear expectations, and is interested in having a "rising tide lift all boats".
5. Being financially secure. This includes good health insurance. I sleep a lot better at night now that my income is significantly more than my needs. I can worry about the things that matter and not the fluctuations in my bank account.

The first 4 have been proven over and over in psychology studies to make people happier. Doing "something you love" means that I make my hobbies into a job. It is a good way to become sick of both and then be miserable.

Better tighten that onion on your belt. Meeting the STCW-95 requirements would be really tough without a dedicated educational/hand-on program. Working your way up from AB or wiper is for masochists. It could be done, but it is a far harder path for the same result. It is a throwback to the time when people had careers and pensions. Now people have jobs and need to change companies frequently. The marine industry is no different than any other industry today- no company wants to pay to train anybody, they want to hire someone who has all the certifications and experience already, and they don't want to pay a dime more than they have to in salary.

I do think that the standard 3rd mate/3rd engineer track could be shortened to 3 or even 2 years, but at that point it becomes Training rather than an Education (and as an instructor, you should appreciate the difference). In-state Maritime Academy is one of the best purchases I ever made. It is truly a bargain when you look at all the idiots spending $40k a year to become English majors.

I really disagree with your statement that " Admittedly the students also get a "marine engineering degree" over and above the training for the license that is transferrable to a lot of shore-side professions, but most of that is lost on the students. All they care about is getting the license...". It wasn't that long ago that I was in school. 2/3 of my classmates wanted to graduate, get their license, start jobs, and get on with their lives. The license is just a tool for them to get there. Only about half of my license-bearing classmates were still shipping out after 5 years. Everybody knows that shipping out is a marriage-killer and a poor way to raise kids. The degree is not a fallback plan if the license doesn't pan out for some reason. The coast guard license opens only a handful of doors (albeit important ones). The degree is a piece of paper that opens many kinds of doors.

The population of Lakewood is over 140,000 people. Not enourmous, but worth stopping at.

I have been on the bullet trains in Japan, and the non-super-express ones stop at some fairly small stations. The key is that their trains are electrified, which allows for very fast acceleration. They also stop only long enough to let people on and off- 1 minute or less. When they changed from the 500 series to the N700 series, the acceleration was improved by about 80%. Even though the N700 has a lower top speed, it is faster to get to the destination because of the fast acceleration.

Really?

There are about 1.18 trillion paper/coin USD in circulation. Let's estimate that 60-75% is held outside the US nowadays (this is a difficult number to calculate so it is basically an educated guess). There are about 350 million people in the US, so we have roughly (1.18 trillion *100*0.4) / 350million or 135,000 physical currency units per person ($1350.00). This seems low, but this represents physical currency, not money in bank accounts.

Now compare to bitcoin. If we assume 1 billion ("the world will have plenty") people use it, then we have (21 million * 100 million) /1 billion or 2,100,000 currency units (Satoshi) per person.

But wait, shouldn't we compare apples to apples? Let's include ALL USD, including all USD that are electronic. That's the M2 indicator, which is currently around $10trillion. If we assume that 1 billion people all over the world are sharing USD currency, that comes out to 1,000,000 currency units per person. So the Satoshi has only about double the curency units per person (assuming 1 billion people) that the USD has. BUT the US creates more money, and Bitcoin "loses" money over time (it is deleted, forgotten, hard drive crash, etc).

Bitcoin as it currently stands is the IPv4 of currency. If it becomes popular, I can easily imagine not having enough divisible units to go around.

Back in the day, everybody hated AT&T too. They were a monopoly, they charged too much, never innovated, etc etc. They were still a more convenient option for communicating compared to USPS so people used them anyway.

Regardless of what Americans think, there is no other superpower who wants or tries to be the world's police. So other countries expect the US to be the world's police. Just look at all the pressure we are getting on Syria.

As for myself, I don't think we should do serious intervening, even in Syria. But I do think that we could quietly put our thumb on the scale and tilt it one way or another. The war needs to end- hundreds of thousands of refugees are fleeing across the border to western-friendly Turkey, our BFF Jordan, and already-unstable Egypt. Turkey is not a particularly rich country, but at least it is decently large. Jordan is not a rich country and is quite small. Egypt is kind of a basket case right now. If any of them crack under the strain of all these poor and jobless immigrants, nothing good will come of it. The biggest risk here is not terrorists, it is the crippling economic burden of millions of refugees. Having 1 failed state in the region is bad enough. We don't need a handful of lawless regions.

Why is this such a popular game in Japan? Most Japanese colleagues I met love this game, but I knew a couple guys who really took it to extremes. It almost made me want to order a 28oz steak for them when they visited the US.

Add some spreadsheets, and I think you just described this new ultra-realistic RPG that I've been playing for the last few couple decades. Death is permanent, and it is really difficult to move up and requires a lot of grinding. Plus there are loads of hackers, but only if you know the right 1% of people.

There are only a handful of legitimate industries that have a profit margin higher than 10%. Notably real estate, lawyers, healthcare, and defense contractors. If a grocery store had a currency fluctuation of 20% in one month, they would probably be ruined, since they typically run on margins of 1-5%. Price stability is a good thing. Price stability means you know basically what something costs today, and tommorow, and the next day. If you don't know what something costs, how do you conduct transactions? 1% change a month is disastrous (about 12.7% a year!). How any sane person can argue that a 30% shift in exchange rate is "stable" is completely beyond me.

Unless you are reading a subject which is "owned" by one individual, who furiously defends it against changes they don't agree with. You don't even have to get to an obscure subject to find this, just a non-controversial subject that might not be that much fun to write about for most people. If you come across this, it isn't groupthink- it is just people "making stuff up".

Nobody cares what you (or anybody else) did in elementary school. I'm sure the teachers work hard, but K-12 is more about making sure someone can be a productive member of society rather than teaching anything in particular. K-12 is a test, just like passing the GED is a test. If you pass it, for the rest of your life you can say with some confidence that you are not a complete failure, no matter how much of a failure you might become.

This is just one more reason why Microsoft needs to provide GPU performance indications in Taskmgr.exe. GPU's used to be somewhat specialty hardware, and only serious gamers, somewhat serious gamers, or professional graphic or CAD users had powerful ones. Nowadays with the new APU-type chips even the cheapest computers can have a reasonably powerful graphics processor.

There is quite a lot of cogen too. If you are burning the fuel anyway, it makes a lot of sense to use the high-temperature combustion gasses to boil water at high temperature and then run a steam turbine. The steam needed for heating houses, running laundromats, heating businesses, etc is extracted at some point in the turbine.

Why? We can burn a fuel at several thousand degrees F. However, the best pipes we can make can only stand about 1100F (600C) and 3500psi, and these are very expensive and problematic. (For reliability, usually most power plants run at 1000F, 1050F and 2400psi, or sometimes slightly higher). Even at these lower conditions, pipes in the boiler still burst quite frequently (and pipes outside the boiler require wall thickness of several inches). Having high-pressure, high temperature, and high-cost steam pipes running all over town is both prohibitively costly and a safety hazard. So we run the steam turbine, and use cheap piping to houses at much lower pressure and temperature. WE Energies in Milwaukee, for example, tries to run their system between 1 and 200psi, with temperatures near the saturation point.

It is still a misleading and inflammatory statement, both in the article and the summary:

SO2, CO, NOx, particulates, mercury, and all the other nasty stuff has been almost eliminated from fossil plant emissions, at least in all first-world countries (US, Canada, Japan, Europe, UK). Most coal plants have clear or near-clear emissions now. This has happened in the last 30 years. CO2 is a problem, but if you burn anything you get CO2. It is an unavoidable product of burning something. Plus power stations are much more efficient nowadays, increasing in efficiency from an average of maybe 40% to 60%+ today. So less fuel is burned per MW, and less CO2 is emitted per MW.

If I had the choice of living in a 1980 energy world or in a 2013 energy world (ignoring all other technological advancements) I would chose 2013 every time. To say that "the average unit of energy produced today is basically as dirty as it was 20 years ago” is not only misleading, it is wrong. It is propaganda.

I don't like replying to my own posts, but I forgot to add that air-cooled condensers are avoided as much as possible. They use far less water, but use a lot more power to run the air fans. And the cooling surface must be much larger which also adds cost. And the entire cycle is less efficient with an air-cooled condenser because evaporative cooling can always reach a lower temperature (Carnot-type thermodynamics). In summary, cooling towers use more water per MW, but air-cooled condensers burn more fuel per MW.

If you can get the water permit, cooling towers are the way to go. Recently, I have seen air-cooled condensers becoming more popular for both desert applications and to satisfy permitting concerns.